The new site is called WoWPedia, and is already live. From the about page (sans links):

On 2 May 2007, it was announced that WoWWiki would be moving to Wikia, joining major wikis such as Memory Alpha, Wookieepedia and Uncyclopedia. This move occurred two weeks later.

On 29 September 2010, discussion to leave Wikia began, due to irreconcilable differences with Wikia. Due to the result of that discussion, a fork of WoWWiki was created as Wowpedia, with the new site being hosted by Curse and the new wiki becoming usable on 17 October 2010.

Of course, the founders don’t get into what those irreconcilable differences really were, and it would be uncouth to out them so openly anyway. Still, it looks like the move has been in the works for a while now, and the new site has been up for a few days. The new Wiki looks and works just like the old one, although I’ll happily say it has none of the ads and hover-overs that were – while incredibly minor compared to how useful the site was – annoyances on the old site.

Update your bookmarks!

5 Comments so far

Just yet another move of Curse to grab and integrate more community created content under their own, monetized, infrastructure. Happened with WoWAce, happened with other resources, happened with WoWWiki. And, just like those others, the actual creators of the content that made those resources so useful, were neither asked nor given a choice.

Even if they had, it’s doubtful many people would have spoken up. Let’s just hope we don’t see the same things happen as they did with http://www.wardb.com/ or the slow and neglectful death of wowdb.com. If Hubert and his employees weren’t the hypocrites they are, they’d allowed the reverse of their move with WoWAce and WoWWiki and let the community have the code they decided was no longer supportable.

1. Wowace was getting too expensive to host it on their own due to the high bandwidth usage. So 1 of the guys (not clear on who, think it was Kaelten) brought it to his company Curse to host.
2. Users of wowwiki WERE asked their opinion on leaving Wikia for another host. Try reading the wowwiki forums, specifically the 266K thread.
3. Wowdb had a slow death before it was acquired by curse because the previous hosters left Bibi (mmo champion owner) to do all the tech ‘stuff’ and he was spending 12-14 hrs a day on that (his words), and not doing updates, etc. Notice the change in the last few weeks? More stuff going up on the site constantly, and lots of wowdb updates.

As for the original creators, they’re all moving to wowpedia.org Go check out recent changes on wowwiki – most of it is eidts to user pages with a random code, so users can grab the same name safely on wowpedia.org

Oh, really? Let’s talk WoWace for a second. More than one person, me included, offered to spring for three years worth of server, bandwidth, and management (paying the volunteers) if wowace stayed off Curse. Why did we do that? Because we felt it was underhanded to move the previously free and open nature of a code repository under the auspices of a company without entertaining alternatives seriously and without giving authors an explicit need to opt into Curse (rather than presuming consent even if the author expressed displeasure in some venues such as the wowace forums).

We also felt that the move to one, and one only, addon updater (the Curse client) which snuck until long after the switch over code into the AddOns directory meant to feed curse’s DB (Kaelten, back then, said he tried to get that requirement removed but was rebuked by marketing, I wonder if that post is still up, can’t see why not) was wrong. The curse updater makes money for Curse. That’s great. Many people, me included, simply didn’t like the way it was done.

The same opportunity was not given when the move to Curse was announced. I know a few people in the Wiki industry, including one very, very, committed WoW raider who runs a Wiki company, and at least four people who would have sprung to have the site moved to an independent location if there had been a promise of ad-free, not-for-profit, further operation. Again, this didn’t happen.

Lastly wowdb and wardb – as I said before. If the same logic had held true, that something that languishes, lingers, suffers under circumstances, or simply doesn’t take off, can be moved under different auspices to make it come back to life, why didn’t Curse offer the community to continue wardb and wowdb and make the data available? I’d presume that with the move to wowpedia and curseforge/wowace Curse has sent a clear message that sometimes content needs to be moved to live on. I know, for a fact, that this request was made and rebuffed, in the case of wardb.

I had a nice long comment typed up, but it never went through. No matter.

You clearly haven’t done your research regarding Wowpedia’s circumstances, at all. You should start with http://www.wowpedia.org/Forum:Should_WoWWiki_leave_Wikia%3F . The decision was entirely communal, and it is obvious there was a consensus to leave Wikia. If you can’t see that, you are blinded by some other gear to grind.

Was Curse the right choice? Yeah, it probably was. WoWWiki currently serves ~300-400k people per day. WoWAce has never served anything remotely close to that (they haven’t even broken 100k in the past two years, and the only times they’ve come close have been patch days!), and I doubt your independent provider-friends would be able to handle that kind of traffic. Maybe they could have. But we knew Curse could, as they’ve been able to handle MMOC’s traffic, which is double WoWWiki’s.

As regards to money, Curse has stated to us that they don’t monetize wikis, because they would need to plaster the site with ads to do so (sound familiar?), and they are quite aware that wikis are a poor format for ads.

That request for comment already linked was running for a month. Why didn’t your friends speak up? They didn’t know? Didn’t care? Didn’t visit WoWWiki? Essentially, all of those mean that our cry for aid was unnoticed, and we would have just leaped to a provider that wouldn’t be able to provide for us. Curse noticed, so we ran with it.

You sir, are an idiot. Get over your grudges that have nothing to do with Wowpedia. Curse is nothing compared to Wikia, and if you also actually cared about the wiki, you would know that. But you don’t. You just have an axe to grind.

a) The decision to move was communal. Not so much the question as to where. Curse comes up in discussion only a few times, Ackis categorically states “Curse will do it” on Oct 1, followed by Pcj saying “let’s not swap one corporate overlord for another so quickly” (loosely quoted).

b) Nowhere do I state, that the wowace infrastructure comes close to the wikipedia structure in traffic and server demands. You yourself claimed “thousands of dollars for the initial move and setup”. You might want to acquaint yourself with actual costs. The WoW wiki is large, but not that large. It’s, just from looking at the stats, somewhere in the middle of larger size data.

c) “Our cry for aid was unnoticed” – I count a number of offers (London Open Source host, for example) and a number more offers to financially support the move and placement. Again, no issues with the move (because apparently, the new skin made people physically ill), issues with the determination where to move.

Yes, your opposition to Wikia, dislike of the new skin, etc. are duly noted and shared. Yet, for some reason I can’t see how that translates into Curse being discussed thoroughly and decided upon by the community.